new 3D lab, recommendations please

[heddle]

Hi,

I have some money to set up a 3D lab at a university for scientific visualization. Things like displays for high energy physics experiments or visualizations of magnetic storms in space. I am anticipating something like 2 60-70" 3D active displays, glasses, 4 high-end workstations, and software.

I could use some recommendations:

1) Software. What are my options for software? Are there any good open source libraries? Are there commercial libraries for programming active 3D displays?

(Stupid question: do you even need specialized software to program for 3D displays or do you just use opengl and the display's driver takes care of everything?)

2) Displays--any recommendations at the 60"-70" size?

3) Video cards--any recommendations?

4) Hardware? I am thinking just high end desktops from DELL. Is that reasonable? Any suggestions? Are Macs preferred?

5) If not Mac OSX, is linux preferred or Windows?

6) JAVA or C++ or some specialized commercial language?

I have to put together a proposal with about a $35K budget. Any info/help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Blazkowicz]

About your stupid question : I tried nvidia's 3D stereo driver (for games, Direct3D and maybe OpenGL) more than 10 years ago, and later the equivalent for 3DFX boards (supported only glide2x and miniGL, not glide3x and real OpenGL.. the software was from the 1990s).

Yes, you would simply hit Ctrl-T and the game switched to stereo 3D, with everything done by the driver.
But things like HUD, crosshair, lens flare, "corona" lights mess things up and are placed at zero depth.
A visualization app run this way can be perfect if you're lucky or made it so, or can possibly be almost entirely constructed with "pathological" objects I suppose?


1) Talking about OpenGL and Direct3D.. So there's that old method of "driver hack" that enables 3D, the recent consumer solutions still do that : nvidia 3D Vision, and AMD HD3D.
I think this stuff only works on Windows. About linux I've only found this crazy page when someone reverse engineers the system http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~zwood/teaching/csc572/final11/rsomers/

With Direct3D 11.1, there's now explicit support for stereo 3D built-in. It's exclusive to Windows 8.x. I don't know more about it.

Now, the other way of using stereo, which dates from the 1990s too, is quad buffering stereo, supported by OpenGL. You simply have two double buffers, one for each eye. I suppose it's more "explicit" stereo.

A special connector/cable on the graphics card is needed, so you need a Quadro (I don't know about AMD FirePro there). You get support in linux (this quad stereo stuff was used historically on Unix workstations)

See there :
http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_pro_graphics_boards_linux.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/3d-vision-professional-users.html

So question 3) : a Quadro K4000?, still affordable, does Windows or Linux, Quad buffer OpenGL or "3D vision".
or a geforce (like e.g. a GTX 760) : does Windows only, D3D or OpenGL, "3D vision", faster and a lot cheaper.
AMD Quad buffer exists too, but I don't know about it.

4) 5) See the latest Mac Pro, Apple seems to not care anymore about users with weird needs, and all your stuff would have to run in OS X 10.9 with their particular drivers. I think they care about Photoshop users and people who process digital sound/music, and that's all.
So have a PC, with linux or Windows or both (you can get Windows licenses for virtually free anyway?)

1) 6) about software itself, I'm thinking about Processing, but you need to hunt down libraries made by whoever, I think.
Quick googling gives me a commercial program : Awizo, stereoscopic rendering supported, modular (just buy the core thing), price unknown..

And a BSD-licensed toolkit, 20 years and going, used by other visualizations apps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VTK
Runs on Windows/linux/Mac, choice of using C++, Tcl, Perl, Python, Java for your app.. Lol, I think you can leave TCL and Perl out
/edit : python can be used in Gimp and Blender so it has something going for it. Slow language though.

2) I don't know much about the TVs.. An annoyance may be because of HDMI 1.4a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hdmi#Version_1.4
If you run at 1080p, HDMI 1.4 only supports 24Hz per eye? not that it will flicker, but it will be a bit slow and maybe laggy (like mouse lag, that sort of thing).
Do TVs support HDMI 1.4b (60Hz per eye), I don't know, and I think graphics card don't.
If you want/need Quadro, will you get Displayport to HDMI working, I don't know.

Ideally big TVs will support Displayport but I think we're not there yet.

 

[Alexko]

I know this seems somewhat beyond the scope of your question, but have you given any thought to interaction?

With 2~3 large, high-definition displays you may find that the traditional mouse+keyboard interface just doesn't work anymore, as users are likely to want to stand and walk around the room to get closer to a particular display, or to stand back in order to get a better overall view. I'm assuming you'll be using 4K displays, which seems like the minimum definition for monitors of this size.

Then will then want to pan and zoom, select elements to get additional information from, or otherwise interact with them, and that just doesn't work if they have to sit at a desk because they're tied to a mouse and keyboard.

As for the hardware, and as much as I dislike Apple, I'd say that the new Mac Pros seem pretty compelling for this sort of use. They have a lot of graphics horsepower with three DisplayPort 1.2 outputs, which is pretty much ideal for this sort of thing, and they offer very decent performance/dollar (by workstation standards). However, I have to say that I have doubts about stereoscopy with bezels, but maybe it's not that big of a deal, I don't know, I haven't tried it.